 Drama: August 24, 2016 Issue [#7802] |
  Drama
This week: Writing about Grief and Loss Edited by: Joy  
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“I guess by now I should know enough about loss to realize that you never really stop missing someone-you just learn to live around the huge gaping hole of their absence.”
Alyson Noel, Evermore
“We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.”
Dr. Viktor Frankl-- neurologist, psychiatrist, and holocaust survivor
"Only people who are capable of loving strongly can also suffer great sorrow, but this same necessity of loving serves to counteract their grief and heals them.”
Leo Tolstoy
“Is war perhaps nothing else but a need to face death, to conquer and master it, to come out of it alive -- a peculiar form of denial of our mortality?”
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
“When someone you love dies, and you're not expecting it, you don't lose her all at once; you lose her in pieces over a long time”
John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany
Hello, I am Joy , this week's drama editor. This issue is about showing grief and loss in our stories.
Thank you for reading our newsletters and for supplying the editors with feedback and encouragement.
Note: In the editorial, I refer to third person singular as he, to also mean the female gender, because I don't like to use they or he/she.
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Welcome to the Drama newsletter
In our civilized world, we don’t exactly know how to deal with grief and loss, although we all experience their sorrow, at one time or another. Grief and loss are also the more fixed, more insidious, and somewhat lonelier emotions when compared to the rest, and showing them without falling into sappiness is difficult to do. For these reasons, I had stayed away from looking into the writing of grief, although I have expressed grief in my writing in one form or another.
Then I got lucky as Writing.com always has its ways of pushing my buttons because I came across a very thorough and profound article written by one of our WdC friends, "Effects of Grief" [13+] by ~Minja~  , and her in-depth analysis became an inspiration for this editorial.
It is an excellent idea to start with research into grief and loss like WdC members' articles and Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s Five Stages of Grief because death and loss are inevitable in real life as well as in our stories, and we need to understand it well for grief is not like any other emotion due to its capacity to persist, drift, or change shape.
The power in a story has to do with evoking emotions but without sappiness and coming as close to the truth as possible. Our favorite heroes and heroines in the most acclaimed stories succeed to live with their losses, and their courage strengthens us. Yet, during the course of the story, through dealing with their losses, those characters make the readers feel empathy for them.
The emotion of grief is full of secrets. To show this emotion successfully, the writer has to take into account a few facts, while staying loyal to the theme of his story and who the character is. The most important thing is to find out--from the character’s own point of view--what the main character's story is about his loss, which he tells himself and believes in it strongly or maybe wrongly. His first explanation in this area can offer excellent turns, twists, and conflicts, later inside the plot.
The next question could be, then, how is his loss changing him? Going back into the story before the loss can give the writer clues to why this change will be important for his character’s development in any direction.
In real life and in stories, the grieving character may choose or cause his own isolation. At this junction, other conflicts need to be introduced into his life. This is because a writer may be ensnared by the character’s suffering and produce a static chapter or section in the story. This is quite natural as grief itself has a long life, but the writer has to be wary of passive and stagnant paragraphs and chapters.
In a grief story, the character is the main focus. To portray him fully, here are some points to take into account.
1. The character’s traits, quirks, and elements of his being and how much or how many of those the writer needs to show
2. The character’s surroundings, family, friends, style of life
3. How and why the character changes
4. His healing and what tampers, obstructs, and interferes with it
5. What can worsen life for the character
6. How much of the story time the character can take in order to heal or to totally sink into depression
In addition, showing the five stages of grieving can be a boon or a bust since some characters may skip a stage or those stages can change their order of occurrence. As we all know, everyone grieves in their own way; however, those five stages may give the writers something to think about. The five stages are: Denial, anger, Bargaining (with fate) which depends on the hope that the situation will change and loss will be remedied, Depression, Acceptance.
Whether the grief is the result of a death, a breakup, or a loss of something important to the character, it is a good idea to make it subjective for him because, as in real life, he is going to grieve in his own very special way, and the writer’s challenge is in respecting who the character is while moving the story forward and, in the meantime, staying with the authenticity of grief and loss.
Until next time! 
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 Here's to RavenAmor  who wrote a poem for each of the five stages of grief 
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 This Issue's Tip is a quote about dramatic dialogue:
“According to John Howard Lawson, The Technique of playwriting, the dramatic dialogue must always be “a compression and extension of action… [speaking] comes from energy and not from inertia…[Thus dramatic speech] serves as it does in life, to broaden the scope of action; it organizes and extends what people do. It also intensifies the action. The emotion which people feel in a situation grows out of their sense of its scope and meaning.
"Think of speech as action. “
From How to Write Dazzling Dialogue by James Scott Bell.
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Feedback for "The Importance of a Character's Mind"
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Shannon 
Aw, thank you for featuring my short story "The Promise" in this week's drama NL, Joy. 
You're welcome. I love your stories, Shannon.
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